Dealer No. 1: an extract
They say that everyone has their drug of choice. For some people it’s power or success or sex or, if you believe the gossip magazines, just being adored; for others it’s heroin or alcohol, and for others again it’s adrenaline.
Me, I’d discovered cash.
Cash was my drug of choice. Cold, hard cash, and the security that it could buy me and my family. After a lifetime of not having any I’d discovered an easy way to acquire it and I began to spend most of my time doing just that, or thinking of ways to get even more. But it wasn’t the money itself. Never having had any money when I was a kid, I had no taste for things: gadgets, toys, bikes... whatever. Ok, I’d had a kite once, when I was a kid, a nice one with shaped like a dragon, but that was more about what it did than what it was. And what cash did for me was make my family secure. It meant that we could pay our rent, cover our bills, buy decent food, nice clothes, and we weren’t going to have to move out in the middle of the night to escape an aggrieved landlord or an angry ex-boyfriend. On that particular subject, Mam was still with Martin, which I didn’t much approve of, though I always think ‘better the devil you know’ and all that, and me and him had reached a sort of unspoken non-aggression pact: he didn’t bother with me and my 150lb fighting dog didn’t bite him. At first he tried to persuade mam to make me get rid of the dog, but even she recognised when something was not negotiable, and Maximus was absolutely not going to leave my side any time soon. So generally, Martin and me agreed to disagree, we rarely spoke, we didn’t argue, and if he came into a room, I left.
And vice versa.
Pretty soon I stopped using the living room altogether, which was ok; I like to read books. A lot of the time I wasn’t running my operation I was just sitting in my room reading. They’d closed all but one of the libraries in town, but I didn’t even have to borrow from Waterstones; I could actually buy books as I had so much money now, though I still preferred to borrow them, and I discovered that there was a whole genre of books about how to persuade people to do things that they didn’t always want to do, books on the psychology of selling, of winning and of using others to get what you want. I read them all: Dale Carnegie, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, all the classics. Funny thing was, the things they said, most of it I was doing already. Schooling was pretty much irrelevant by this point, though you could argue that my education in the ways of the world was moving forward at a geometric rate. The summer holidays had begun, I was heading toward my final year, I was almost sixteen and there was nothing that school could teach me. Nothing that made any sense. Nothing apart from Emily. Thing is, the drug side of it, the dealing, I knew it couldn’t last and I knew it was wrong. It just made me work harder, knowing that it’d stop at some point. I was like a squirrel, vacuuming up as much money as I could and burying it for when we’d needed it, for when our luck ran out. I was making more money than I could count, buying wholesale from Andy, buying just about anything we could sell, cutting it with everything from washing-up powder to migraine tablets to that space dust that kids buy that crackles in your mouth, and then selling it to on to people stupid enough to buy it. I knew the whole deal was going to implode on me at some point but I just hoped to have saved up enough money by that point. Enough money for what though? Simple truth was, I didn’t know, at this point just the having was enough. Maybe enough money to keep us alright until I could officially leave school and could get a job. I didn’t care what sort of job, anything with a regular, dependable wage, I’d do it.
But until then, I was doing this.
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